“When the sun comes up his garden comes to life, it’s almost like a Pee-wee’s Playhouse type of relationship.”
Photo: Dark Horse Records via YouTube
Not to be too dramatic, but it’s unlikely that Finn Wolfhard would be where he is today without the work of George Harrison. “I wouldn’t have pursued performing at a young age in the same way,” he says. First introduced to Harrison’s music at the age of 6 by his mother, Wolfhard was encouraged to dig deeper beyond the constant loops of Help! from his family’s CD player — his favorite song is “I Need You” — and discovered that the Beatles also dabbled as actors. Even at such a young age, Wolfhard had the foresight to think, he loved to act and sing, so why not try to be a double threat, too? “That was a huge inspiration to me,” Wolfhard explains. “You don’t have to just be one thing. George is a perfect example of that, who accomplished so much as a solo artist and as a person after the Beatles.”
Wolfhard is now finding himself at a similar divergent point, but instead of Let It Be, it’s the conclusion of his popular Netflix series, Stranger Things. (Which he’s thrilled not to talk about for a change. “This is a relief,” he quips at one point. “I’d rather talk about George all day.”) As his first project released amid a hailstorm of theories about the show’s impending finale, Wolfhard directed the official music video for Harrison’s 1973 song “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” which was the No. 1 song in the country over five decades ago when Harrison’s Living in the Material World album was released. “It’s such a wild way that I got involved,” Wolfhard explains.
About two years ago, Wolfhard was shooting Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire in and around London. Thanks to his co-star Paul Rudd’s friendship with Dhani Harrison, George’s son, Wolfhard met Dhani when he visited the Ghostbusters set. The two of them hit it off, and an invitation was soon extended to visit Dhani and Olivia Harrison, Harrison’s widow, at Friar Park. “There’s a lot of history there,” Wolfhard says of the famed property. “His guitars are still up on the walls. In fifth grade, I wrote an essay about George’s guitars. We had to do research on and pick something that you were passionate about, so I chose that, and now I was actually seeing them.” Over a year later, in June, Wolfhard met Fred Armisen at a “weird type of Hollywood Netflix party,” and they found themselves in a deep conversation about music history. “I got a random text from Fred after a few days and he was like, ‘Hey, the George Harrison estate is trying to figure out a director for “Give Me Love,” but they haven’t found anyone yet. I threw your name in the hat.’ I was shocked,” Wolfhard recalls. “It was flattering enough that he even mentioned me. Then it was a coincidence that I already knew Dhani.”
Wolfhard, who co-directed the 2023 comedy-slasher film Hell of a Summer and recently released his debut studio album, was soon cleared by the Harrison estate to direct the music video, which entirely consists of Claymation. Working with a team of young animators and friends in Toronto throughout the month of November, he wanted to tell a story of “a guy who found solace and a really nice relationship with gardening” at his Friar Park home. The stop-motion Harrison has friendly interactions with gnomes, a Venus flytrap, a distinguished-looking oak tree, and even a sentient being who lives in a cave. (Which Vecna can’t get to.) “When the sun comes up his garden comes to life, it’s almost like a Pee-wee’s Playhouse type of relationship,” Wolfhard says. “It was playing with the idea that these plants are alive and have so much history. This is a tribute to someone who loved his garden.”
Although Wolfhard worked remotely from the animators and didn’t have his own Ben Wyatt Claymation moment, he walked them through, shot by shot, his vision for what this Friar Park garden should look like — even sourcing photos of his visit to ensure something like, say, the moss looked as real as he remembered. The team of 20 artists then constructed each and every element by hand. “Sometimes I would send a video of myself doing the movement of George so that they could take it,” he says. “From them, it was a lot of giving notes over the phone and texts, and having my friends round out and take liberties where I wasn’t able to. They did an unbelievable amount of work every day.” Wolfhard is also an avid gardener at the home he shares with his family in British Columbia, which gave him an extra layer of knowledge. “I’m gone for so much of the year, so my mom and dad had been tending to the garden, but I was involved in the planning process,” he adds. “A lot of it was inspired by Friar Park. I wanted the Japanese maple and a lot of different wildflowers.”
Wolfhard isn’t quite sure why, but there’s one particular interview Harrison did in adulthood that he found himself thinking about while working on this project: The Quiet Beatle said that he sometimes feels like he’s on the wrong planet. He feels great when he’s in his garden, but the moment he steps outside the gate, he questions what he’s doing there. Wolfhard hopes, in that spirit, he’s the type of person who’s giving oxygen as opposed to taking it away from others. “That’s a very beautiful and relatable thing that all of us are trying to chase, which is centeredness and feeling like you can be yourself,” Wolfhard says. “What I work towards is finding that state of yourself where you’re not judging anything about yourself or about any other people, and you’re just experiencing the life around you. Just like George.”
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